Super Injunctions reinforce #altnews as premier source of news for public

By Dark Politricks

The Super Injunction fiasco just goes to show once again that the lame stream media cares more about bikini snaps of Pippa and Kate Middleton than any kind of real investigative reporting. Once again it is left to the #altnews sites on the web to report the stories that the mainstream media would rather you didn’t know.

Whilst the Middle East is up in arms with dictators and Arab leaders assassinating dissidents our papers are full of Royal weddings and snaps of their relatives on holiday in skimpy swimwear.

Whilst the White House tell falsehood after falsehood about the Pakistani raid that supposedly led to the assassination of the worlds most wanted terrorist. And whilst the lamestream media just take Obama’s word that the only option was to assassinate what would have been the intelligence opportunity of a lifetime by taking him alive and instead executing him unarmed before dumping his body in the sea the UK media are fretting about their right to sell newspapers based on the kiss and tell stories of tarts and illegally obtained private information.

It was interesting to see this morning on the 24 hour news channels the journalists brought out to defend “free speech” as the UK Press likes to call paparazzi snaps of the vaguely famous and their sleazy sex stories involving footballers and reality TV stars was from the Guardian and not the News of the World.

Due to the UK’s subservience to European law and our lack of a privacy law or Bill of Rights enshrining our right to free speech such as that in the USA it has been left to the UK courts to create a situation in which people with money and a penchant for sexual scandal are granted privacy and the papers lose out on a titillating headline.

These people after being rumbled by the paparazi or tipped off before being exposed by the gutter press are using the UK courts to block details of their affairs from coming to light through that prevent the press from displaying details of the people involved and even the fact that an injunction is in place.

The papers claim that it’s the public right to know and their freedom to print gossip and salacious tat that is at risk due to their victims right under article 8 of the Human Rights Act to respect for one’s “private and family life, his home and his correspondence” and protection for “private and family life”.

Of course the argument the press is pushing is a false one and as anybody who reads British tabloids should know it is being used by the papers to paint themselves as defenders of free speech sticking up for the common man’s right to know who Jemima Khan has been sleeping with rather than the peddlers of filth and irrelevant nonsense they really are.

The recent snaps of the Middleton sisters are a case in example as even if their legal action is successful the pictures are out in the public sphere, the public have had their fill of bikini shots and any damage to their reputation has already been done. Even with a front page apology and a big fat settlement the genie cannot be put back in the box so to speak.

Max Mosely himself has said a number of times to gain an injunction in the UK courts is pretty hard and the burden of proof is on the person seeking the injunction to prove that the allegations about to be published are either false or serve no public interest and would severely affect the persons right to privacy under the Human Rights Act.

Instead of preventing legitimate stories of political corruption from being published the press would lose out on all those so so important kiss and tell stories that are the mainstay of certain fleet street publications. As Max Mosley said:

“This is just about whether the newspapers should have the right to publicise very private aspects of people’s lives which there’s no public interest in at all – it’s just purely for titillation and to sell newspapers,” he told the BBC.

They said in the UK the right to a private life was already protected by self-regulation of the press, access to civil courts to seek damages, and interim injunctions where applicable.

Therefore unless our government enacts a law covering our right to privacy that is balanced with our right to free speech it seems we are left with the unworkable situation which we have at the moment in which a press that cannot be trusted to regulate itself will be in constant battle with the courts.

Whilst judges issue injunctions that prevent the UK print media and TV news from running certain stories someone withinternet access can easily find out all the info they require. The papers might be blocked from telling use who Rooney or Giggs has been screwing lately but overseas papers, the blogosphere, and social media sites like Twitter continue to satisfy the needs of those people who give a shit.

The Tory Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has said Parliament, not judges, should make decisions about privacy issues and that it was a “crazy situation” that super-injunctions were banning newspapers from publishing stories which were freely available online. A former Lord chancellor Lord Falconer also repeated that Twitter had now rendered super-injunctions “pointless”.

For those of us who care about real news stories this is just a sideshow that distracts everybody from stories that actually matter instead of those that do not.

Once the information is out in the public sphere there is less chance a judge will grant an injunction and the Internet is the perfect place to anonymously post gossip and then use that publication as a way of saying “either grant a worldwide injunction or crackdown on the net”. The first is impossible to achieve and the second is being advanced upon piece by piece.

So for those people who care about the freedom of the press to invade your privacy and tell the nation about your sexual activities, kinky fetishes and print photo’s of your semi naked body then today’s ruling in the EU Court of Human Rights should come as a happy moment.

Mad Max couldn’t get his law implemented to ensure the press tell any potential subjects of a story before it’s published so the only recourse for those people affected by such public attacks in the press is to continue down the road of injunctions, post print apologies and civil court fines if the press goes too far.

Until our elected politicians, some of which are rumoured to have their own super-injunctions, enact a law to draw a line in the sand between privacy and free speech then we will have to rely on the internet for our gossip as well as our real news and analysis.